Google announced last October that they would be beta testing their Google Fiber initiative in a small residential neighborhood affiliated with Stanford University, and one lucky Redditor posted the results. The service is being provided free to the faculty and staff of Stanford that live just off campus and the speeds are mostly unheard of in this country. This beta test, of course, comes ahead of the roll-out of their Kansas City experiment in 1 Gbps fiber internet service. Speedtest results linked and pictured below for you to drool over.

Size is less important than lack of initiative in our market and lack of line sharing requirements.

The US market is not much of a free market, there's no need to invest in infrastructure when no one can afford to enter your turf and compete, besides, who the heck wants ten phone/cable/electric/driveways lines to their home, line sharing is the wisest thing they did in Europe.

The slow but profitable progress on this side of the Atlantic is a good situation for the monopolies/duopolies but bad for the consumers.Reply

It's certainly not the size of a country but population density that should count at best. So if that is true, where are the 1 GBps offers in the big cities (NY, SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.)?

The difference is that in the US the ISPs are granted area monopolies or duopolies by the virtue of the right of way. if You don't believe me, go to your town hall and have a look at the contracts that the telco/cable companies have with your city government.

In many European states there have been government monopolies for telco and when those got dismantled in the 80s, they did own the wires and the rights of way. Now they have to sublease their cables and their facilities for decent (government controlled) prices. So the end consumer companies compete for your business on the same lines.

And the government subsidies are in the government payed for infrastructure of rights of way and facilities from the government monopoly days. Similar subsidies have been granted in the US too. At the very least the government used imiinent domain to get the right of way needed in some cases. Reply

Sonic.net today announced it has been selected to operate and support the trial fiber-to-the-home network Google is building at Stanford University. This experimental project will test new fiber construction and operation methods, while delivering full gigabit speeds to approximately 850 faculty and staff owned homes on campus.Reply

As the internet is slowly replacing free broadcast channels for news and entertainment.... This nation needs to move towards a free wifi network. There is no reason why people should not have access to this 'super information highway'. Premium service could still be provided by cable companies through strict regulations to prevent price gouging or service throttling.

Holy BATMAN!!!!!!! Hold on, let me do the math right quick. Yeah, 303.36 times faster than my current "broadband" internet. Let me be clear here. I live 40 minutes from Chicago. I have the FASTEST internet available to me. I pay for 6MPBS downloads. There has been "an unidentified issue on the line" for years at this point. So realistically I get 5.12 down .63 up. Ping is 53ms.

Seriously Google; I will gladly pay you 100/month for this internet. But so help me if you start putting bandwidth caps on it like everyone else... (shakes fist).

So bandwidth caps are, ostensibly, there to ensure good performance for all users. Keeping a small group of users from dominating the available bandwidth should leave plenty for everyone else. Cable companies use fiber as their backbone and use nodes to serve a group of houses, so the caps are really an effort to protect all users on a given node. If Google is really bringing fiber from the house to the street and the backbone is strong enough then they really shouldn't need to cap. If the backbone is weak, they still might not need to cap if everyone plays nice. I'm guessing they will build out the KC network properly and keep it cap-free.Reply